


Burned

by AuntyA



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:12:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6895063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyA/pseuds/AuntyA





	Burned

Sampson stuck her gloved finger underneath the headset earpiece, trying to get the protector to sit properly on her ear. It must be around the ten-hour mark in this shift by now. That's about the time when her gear always started to feel like it was chained to her. She shook her head from side to side and the ear protector finally slipped back over her ear.

She took the chopper down lower and craned her head to look left. She had thought she saw a thin grey tendril wisping out and up, over by the river bend.

"Check my eleven. Please Sam-son." The spotter in the back's voice came jarringly through the headset.

"Got it. Sure thing Folk." Quasi-military jargon of the Settlers’ Altr vocabulary made everything so much easier of course. Not. Shit. Folk was passive aggressive today.

They had already been checking this area for at least 2 hours. Folk had noticed that she was getting tired and probably decided to sharpen the focus. Sampson could see tendrils of the territory smoke curling around her boots on the pedals. The cockpit was damn hot.

She corrected her turn smoothly. She was sticking to her seat from the heat. She was glad the doors were open but the thick haze from the burn was permeating all of the air and it had been hard to breathe for a while even with the masking. She lowered her hand from the switches above her head and scraped her sweat wet hair off her forehead. Hot. She knew she wasn't a great flyer sometimes. She was always thinking about something else.

There was some crackling and a low whispering impulse communication in her earpiece from the camp lead. She responded with the code sign and then turned her head to the backseat. "Folk? If you've identified and charted already then we're supposed to head back. The next shift is waiting for the vehicle. Folk? Please?"  It was hard sometimes to remember that she needed to modulate her voice so as not to irritate an already defensive Folk.

"Around once more please. By the oxbow over there. Grid fourteen perhaps Sam-son?" And then that sharp cough that signaled Folk was done talking and was now ignoring her to look down at the burn through the equipment.

"Sure thing Folk." Once more for luck. The helicopter turned and came around in a slowly banked loop. 

That grating atonal voice was a bit hard to take over the headset. Some people didn't want to partner with Folk but Sampson had never cared about that type of stuff. Now she was permanently rostered on the fire flyover schedule together with Folk. She didn't mind most of the time.

Folk was smart and could do some things faster than other spotters. But the level of tiresome detail Folk needed to finish anything was a drag if you were in a rush.

Settlers weren't anything new to her really. She hadn't grown up in the sticks like most of the crew on the ten shift at this camp. Her city training school had a larger graduating class than the population of the nearest town in the regions. Some of her fellows there had been Settlers although those students had only been partnered with Settlers. No mixed Settler-Land teams. That was the rule then.

Admittedly there was tension in that class. That was a given. She wasn't sure that the Settlers had even noticed. The Legislation being enacted during their graduation year hadn't helped. Samson had been one of the last graduating classes with Land students.

But for Sampson those clipped breathy sounds and unblinking eyes in the smoothed pale face drew her in. Her Land camp crew buddies now only put up with Folk because they had to and because she was the partner. In camp Folk was completely ignored by the Land crew who spoke only in ULF whenever Folk was present.

Sampson didn't really approve of that but she knew it was the reality. Settlers were takers. Grasping. The ULF word for Settler was the same as the word for money.

And actually the Settler class supremacy in the cities was why she was out here now. Settlers had colonized the urban centres completely since they had arrived.

Only these odd fringes of civilization were not under Settler control. Land peoples had no autonomy in the cities and most of those stuck in the urban didn't want to be there.

No-one wanted to be out here in the territories either but they could at least metaphorically take back their communities out here. The land holding fringes had been on fire forever so no-one wanted them. Most city dwellers didn't even know the area existed.

Resources were too hard to extract. Any quality of life in the territories was impossible due to the terrain and the fires.  No services and no Settler communities.

The vast expanse of the burning territories was now populated only by those tiny fire flyover crew camps made up of Land who did the work and Settlers who told them what to do.

Folk had always requested edging sector grid numbers for the scans. Even right at the beginning. They had started right on the burn border. Flying right along the edge of the territories along the thermal wall of smoke, flame, sparks and heat, over and over again. Sampson's flyover shifts took forever in the endless purple dusk that was the sky out here.

Sampson thought the camp crew master must be benefitting somehow from the specifics Folk provided in the grid reporting. She had a sense that something financial was going on between them because just to get approved for this amount of fuel they had used in the last couple of months was insane.

Her mome had always told her when the fires were done she could be who she wanted. When she was small she had believed it. Now she knew better. These fires had been burning for a hundred years at least.  All they could do, all anyone could do, was just map the path and get out of the way. She'd never heard of a Land who had been offworld but Sampson would give her eyeteeth to get out there. See where the Settlers came from for herself. Someday.

Folk interrupted her thoughts, sibilantly enunciating, "Sam-son I think that is what I have been looking for. Check your three. Please."

Sampson thought Folk had an odd sort of plaintiveness of voice that she hadn't heard before. She squinted down at the burn area below on the right, "The hell...What is that thing?" She looked again, startled, "Why are the flames blue there? By the ground. It looks blue. And what do you mean you've been looking for "it"? What is that?"

"Please don't graze me with your voice. It upsets my gradients and I can't process the vision." Folk was withdrawing. Voice on the earpiece was low. 

Sampson's own voice had risen to her normal spoken level unthinkingly when she saw the odd dark shape on the forest floor cloaked in flames. She lowered her voice to apologize. "Sorry Folk. Sorry. I forgot." She looked again at the spot on the grid out the window. "Man, this is just so weird." She said under her breath.


End file.
